And the heroine herself: likeable, beautiful and with an enviable job? Check, check and check (terrific company, looks a decade younger than her 37 years, and is a best-selling author).

Bah, sounds made up to me.

But no, it’s all true, and Ali’s third novel Written in the Stars came out earlier this month. A tale about doubts and decision-making, it’s had the author analysing her own life, not least because she originally intended to become an actress: “But I don’t believe in regret,” she says. “I strongly believe that the decisions we make, the paths we take, and events that happen to us make us who we are.”

They’ve certainly led Ali to a lovely place, but she’s had to work hard for her fairytale ending. Not so long ago, the smiley brunette was a rather rubbish waitress with a big dream…

Growing up in Norfolk, Ali had designs on a writing career from a young age. “I used to fold together little pieces of paper and make up stories,” she says. “And I was an avid reader: the classic kid with nose buried in book, constantly being told to put it down at the dinner table. I loved getting lost in these worlds.”

But the writing dream was put on hold during her teens, thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber. “I fell in love with musicals,” admits Ali with a grin. “Starlight Express was the first one I properly saw: there were all these amazing people roller-skating past me, singing these amazing songs, and I went ‘I want to do THAT!’ I used to sit in my room at 7.45 every night, when the show was starting, and play my album and cry a bit...”

Determined, Ali headed to Middlesex University to study performing arts, but found herself increasingly drawn to the academic side of the subject. “If there was a choice between writing a 5,000 word essay or doing an environmental performance, where invariably a lot of people seemed to end up nude, I would very much stick to the essay!

“But I still wanted to go to drama school. I had this vision of me walking around in black clothes and being very serious and studying Shakespeare.”

After graduating, Ali, like many a wannabe actress, started waitressing to tide her over – and found herself stuck doing it for four years. First up was the famous Capital Radio Café, “where we had to get up and dance to Steps whenever the DJ put it on. It was fun, but I was a terrible waitress: enthusiastic and likeable, just everything used to collapse around me. And at that moment, when everything was collapsing, invariably Steps would come on and I’d have to run off and dance.”

She then moved to a posh Piccadilly eaterie, still reading voraciously in her spare time: “It was the thing that kept me going through doing a job like waitressing: other worlds where things were better. It was the birth of chicklit and I was reading about women like me, who weren’t necessarily in the place they wanted to be in their life. It just made me think ‘I could do this’.”

And so after work, while her fellow waiters would drink long into the night, Ali would have a quick glass of wine and head home, “then I’d be up at eight, writing.

“I wasn’t trying to get an acting agent, I wasn’t doing any plays, but I was sitting down and writing every day. That showed what it was I really wanted to do.”

Egged on by her big sister Jo, Ali completed her first novel - about a struggling waitress - and sent it to 10 literary agents. “I had this vision of riding out of the restaurant on the wave of an enormous book deal, and it was all going to be fabulous… and then the rejections started trickling in.”

When rejection number 10 arrived, Ali was devastated, “and I had a big, big, big cry. Then my sister said: ‘You love writing, you love magazines, why don’t you apply for some work experience and try writing for a living?’ And I did.”

As luck would have it, Ali’s letter to the now defunct Celebrity Looks magazine arrived just as someone pulled out, “so I handed in my notice at the restaurant. It was a five-week placement, but I swore to myself that I wasn’t going back.”

She didn’t need to. A natural journalist, Ali went on to work for the likes of Glamour, Red and Company, and it was thanks to her new-found job that she met Ben. “His sister was in a feature I was writing about four women who were doing their dream jobs. Someone had dropped out, and my editor said ‘Well we’ll just put you in it’, and then we ended up on opposite pages. Ben said to his sister ‘You look great, but who’s that?!’ He was single, and she said ‘I’m sorry if you think this is really weird, but would you mind if my brother maybe emailed you?’ And I said ‘OK, why not?’ And then we basically fell in love over email.”

But career-wise, it was interviewing the writer Rowan Coleman that was to change everything for Ali. “We had a lovely chat, and I said I wanted to write books. She said ‘Let me read something of yours’, and gave me her feedback.

“Then a few weeks later I’d started a column in Company about Ben and our dating life, and I had this letter from her literary agent saying ‘Rowan tells me you’re writing a novel; I love your column, and I’d be really interested to read it when you’re ready’. And then I didn’t send anything for three years,” she says with a laugh. “I knew I wasn’t ready, and I knew that if this was the one opportunity, I didn’t want to waste it.”

After writing and ditching another book, Ali penned a novel about a bitchy PR girl, and her (now) agent sent it off to the publishers, “which was really exciting. It was like ‘This is my moment’… and then the rejections started coming in again!

“But the difference this time was that all of them were incredibly positive. They said ‘We love Ali’s writing, but it’s just not a strong enough debut novel in this market at this moment’.

“However, I’d also sent a synopsis for another book idea, and the majority of them said ‘but we love the sound of this book’. One in particular, who was to become my editor at Simon & Schuster said: ‘I love this so much that I want to meet Ali before she starts writing it’. So we met up, got on brilliantly, then I wrote 15 chapters – and got a book deal.”

The book was Miracle on Regent Street, a fairytale about an ordinary stockroom girl who saves her department store from being taken over by a soulless chain.

“It was completely different to what I’d done before,” she says. “The mistake that I’d made with the book prior to that was that I’d become so desperate for this book deal that I was trying to find a way for them to become interested in me - so I did a women’s fiction bonkbuster hybrid, which wasn’t me at all, and they saw through it.

“Miracle came from writing about someone who felt forgettable, which is how I felt when I was a waitress, and how lots of people in their 20s feel when you’re trying to find your place in the world. It was a joyful experience to write.”

It proved a joyful experience to read too, quickly becoming a Sunday Times bestseller (which, says Ali, felt “wonderful. A dream come true cliché”). And to prove it wasn’t a one-hit wonder, her next book, The First Last Kiss, was a bestseller too.

Ali’s latest novel, Written in the Stars, is a Sliding Doors-style tale of Bea Bishop, a young lady dogged by indecision. “Even as she’s walking down the aisle on her wedding day, you sense that she is torn. Then she slips and falls over, and when she comes to, her world has essentially split: in one version of her life she gets up and marries her boyfriend, and in the other she runs out of the church.

“So it’s a story about whether the choices we make essentially determine our future, or actually it doesn’t matter what we decide – maybe we end up in the same place anyway.

“I’m really pleased with it, but it was Hard Work, in capitals,” she says. “It was really confusing to write, but it was worth it.”

And does Ali, like Bea, have any regrets? Perhaps about giving up on her acting career? “No, because I’m sure I saved a lot of people having to ask for their money back!

“Sometimes when you’re young, you yearn for things that aren’t necessarily right for you. I didn’t end up becoming an actress because I wasn’t meant to be an actress. I would have hated not knowing where the next job is coming from, and I couldn’t have coped with the rejection.

“I know how lucky I am, and this book has taught me that it’s about appreciating the life you’ve got, not the one that you left behind, or the one that you think you should have,” she muses. “And if we could all do that, I think everyone would be a lot happier.”

:Written in the Stars by Ali Harris is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £7.99.

:Ali and her friend and co-author Paige Toon will be signing copies of their latest novels at Waterstones in Sidney Street, Cambridge, from 3pm tomorrow (Saturday June 21).

:Read about Paige Toon in the July edition of Cambridge Magazine, out on Tuesday.